Untempered
by Ace of Gallifrey
Summary: Far out on the edge of the universe, something is wrong in Time, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. The problem, and the fate of a small colony, is left in the hands of a blonde girl with two hearts. ON HIATUS
1. Prologue

**Title-** Untempered  
**Characters/Pairings-** Jenny, 10, no distinct pairings  
**Rating-** K+ until further notice  
**Summary-** Far out on the edge of the universe, something is wrong in Time, and the Doctor is nowhere to be found. The problem, and the fate of a small colony, is left in the hands of a girl with two hearts. But is she up to the challenge?

**A/N-** This probably won't be continued until I find the time to finish my other ongoing story. I just wanted to give you a taste of what I'm working on. Very short little prologue to get the ball rolling, so to speak. As with most of the prologues I write, it's in the present tense. Subsequent chapters will likely be past-tense, but for some reason I just like present-tense prologues.

Also, anyone who can guess what the last line is referencing gets infinite kudos points, because I don't think *I* would get it if I didn't know already. Let's just leave it that I'm drawing heavily on Tom Baker's era here.

* * *

Prologue

_"It's in your head, keep moving on._  
_Become your dad._  
_Live unquestioned."  
-Jimmy Eat World_

_

* * *

_

It is seven terran years to the day- at least as far as she can tell- since she was born in a progenation chamber on Messaline. She's not one hundred percent sure about that, of course. Five of those years ago, she... _acquired_... a time agent's vortex manipulator. From what she can tell, it's only right that she have a way to travel through time. From what she can tell, that's her inheritance.

But as with everything... it's just from what she can tell.

She has no concrete evidence. No facts. All she really knows is what she's read in books, and there are precious few of those on the subject of Gallifrey. Most of what was written about the Time Lords- her people, by proxy- was written _by_ Time Lords, and those books are remarkably difficult to come across. Only a handful exist in the universe anymore, and they are all in the ancient language of Gallifrey, impossible for her or anyone else to decipher, and only useful as relics, gathering dust in some collector's vault. She managed to get her hands on one for a few hours as payment of a favor owed her by the Duke of Cellibor, but it didn't do her much good.

What she knows, though, is that she has a right, more than anyone but her father, to travel freely through time. The vortex manipulator is rudimentary compared to the technology that was rumored to be built on Gallifrey, but she can only work with what she has.

She also knows that the Time Lords are gone. No one is really sure what happened; there are whispers, if you learn how to listen, of a great war. She can confirm that; she's a direct product of the only known survivor. But she doesn't know the details. No one does. All anyone knows is that one minute Gallifrey was there, prosperous as ever, and the next... nothing. Like it had just stepped outside of reality and never came back. This is her inheritance, then: a mysterious, powerful, and nearly extinct race that no one really knew much about but whom everyone respected (and maybe a little bit feared?), and a huge gaping hole in history that can't be explained.

It leaves a little to be desired, to say the least. She'd give anything to learn about the culture, the people, anything, everything. But there's only one person in the universe who could tell her that, and no matter how often she catches a rumor of him and races off in pursuit, she's always just days- or even mere hours- too late.

She came _so_ close on the day the twenty-four planets vanished. She managed to track them as far as the Medusa Cascade, trying to find a way she could help, but there was nothing there. For about half a second, she could've sworn she picked up some kind of signal resonating through the vacuum of space. She even thought she might've caught a glimpse of something shining blue in the nebula-glow. It was all to faint to be sure, though, and it all vanished before she could verify anything.

The planets were all back home only hours later, and on every single one there was talk of a wonderful woman, the DoctorDonna, the fierce and burning savior whose echoes had seared across the Cascade throughout the stolen worlds as she saved them. She wondered. She theorized. She read transcripts of the Daleks' broadcasts across the stolen worlds. But all she could gather was that Donna Noble, the human woman she had met on Messaline, had for a moment become something so much more.

The universe sang of the DoctorDonna, and Jenny Without A Home listened. But she could never quite catch up with the man in the blue box or his legendary friend.

But back to today. It's her seventh birthday.

To celebrate, she's decided to pay a visit to one of the human colonies in A1689-zD1 (better known as the Erimus Galaxy, in human terminology). It's at the farthest edge of the universe known to man, a galaxy so very far away from human origin that it's only in the sixty-third century that human starships are able to reach the SBO-type cluster. As far as she's aware, only one planet has been colonized in the year she's aiming for: Arius-5. It's supposed to be gorgeous. No atmosphere, just the unending expanse of brilliant sky above, visible through the six feet of transparent quartz that make up the bio-domes, and the multi-layered, brilliantly colored silicate that makes up the planet's crust.

It sounds like exactly where she feels like being, today. And so she pilots her little ship- a tinkered up version of the shuttle she stole from Messaline, now with some very advanced warp-shunt technology (which really wasn't compatible with the original engines, but she made friends with a funny little android on Tara with some very advanced engineering skills and he gave her a hand with the ins and outs of blending the two technologies)- to the proper coordinates, then hooks the vortex manipulator into the main drive and prepares to make the time-jump. Three thousand years is guaranteed to be rough. She braces herself and punches the accelerator

And out in the blackness, in the gap between the vortex and the void, someone is laughing...


	2. 1: Something Strange on Arius 5

**A/N-** Well now, since I last posted bits for this story, I COMPLETELY reworked the plot, and you know what? It's pretty freaking awesome now, if I do say so myself. And it still holds true what I said before- I'm still drawing heavily on the Tom Baker era, in fact even more heavily than before- and I'm totally psyched about it. This is WAY cooler than my other Jenny-centric story (which is still awesome because it features DONNA! but still... this one is pretty epic). **And just for the record- official statement here, so pay attention- I do not acknowledge Big Finish stuff as canon in my stories. While it's all very epic and wonderful, I'm not familiar enough to be accurate and therefore... if it happened in Big Finish, it didn't happen here!**

I want to take the time to thank you all for your reviews; I really appreciate it and it makes continuing this so much more worthwhile!

* * *

1. Something Strange on Arius-5

_"No one's from here, no one my dear, _  
_Not even the trees._  
_So change your name, just keep your face. "_  
_-AFI_

* * *

Over the past seven(ish) years, Jenny had gotten very used to strange landscapes and unusual worlds, but Arius-5 was something all its own. Her shuttle popped out of the Vortex a little worse for wear (as per usual) and she ran a diagnostic, taking care to note which parts she'd have to replace this time around (she usually tried to limit her time travel because all these spare parts got expensive, but today was a special occasion). She had piloted the last few miles to Arius-5 manually, approaching the planet which sparkled brightly in its silent, airless orbit. Mentally, she found herself calculating the albedo factor of the planet's reflective crust and simultaneously analyzing the optimal descent pattern for the smoothest entry into the planet's gravity field.

The older she got, the more this happened; she would find her mind suddenly running on two or three or twenty different trains of thought simultaneously. It was disconcerting, but also nice: it gave her a huge advantage in battle (which, admittedly, was shaping up to be a pretty frequent life event for her). She supposed it must just be a Time Lord thing. That was how she explained a lot of the strange things she noticed about herself. An ability to go quite literally months without sleep, endurance infinitely higher than anyone else she'd ever met, and upper body strength which she'd discovered was quite a bit higher than it ought to be... the list was long and grew longer practically every day. She honestly didn't mind that much.

Within a few minutes, she had descended to the surface of Arius-5 and docked her ship in one of the public-access bays (military and scientific flights, as on most worlds, had private landing zones). She passed through the obligatory decontamination stations, tapping her toes impatiently as she was scanned for microbes and unceremoniously washed.

Once she was cleared, Jenny almost sprinted out of the extremely sterile space port, through the sheltered corridor outside, and into the first of the system of interconnected crystal biodomes that ran across the planet's surface. There, in the middle of the crowd of people that filled the dome (the back of her mind registered it as the waiting terminal for the shuttle bay), she froze in place, staring up through the quartz above her.

Millions of miles away, twin suns were rising on the horizon. The pair glowed scarlet and gold against the blackness of space, blotting out the background stars.

Jenny's hearts jumped unexpectedly. She had been to planets with one star, or three, or four, and once even a system of six interacting stars (she hadn't stayed there long), but never before had she landed on a planet orbiting twins. It struck her sharply in the gut, and she didn't know why. Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes as she watched the two slowly creeping over the horizon. For what might've been twenty minutes, she just stood in the middle of the floor and gazed upward, awestruck by something that was completely alien to her and yet felt more... _homelike_... than anything she'd yet seen in her travels.

The spell was broken by a young man bumping roughly into her; she would have fallen to the ground were it not for her superior reflexes.

"Oi, watch it!" she snapped at him. He didn't bother to reply, just walked on. She rolled her eyes at the general rudeness she tended to encounter, especially on colony planets, and moved on, occasionally stealing quick glances at the suns which had so captivated her.

Jenny reached the edge of the terminal dome and found herself in a short customs line. She reached into her messenger bag for her papers- forgeries, of course, which she picked up from a very shady individual on Aneth- and discovered, to her surprise, that they were missing. She pulled the bag around to her front so as to search it more thoroughly, but it became apparent very quickly that her identification was missing, as was her wallet.

She groaned inwardly. The man who had bumped into her must have gone and picked her pockets as well! How the hell had she missed _that_? She was normally very good at detecting supposedly stealthy actions!

Before she could retrace her steps in an attempt to find the thief and retrieve her stolen items, however, she found herself at the front of the line.

"Papers, please," stated a bored-looking, slightly violet humanoid.

"I, uh, haven't got any," she mumbled, feeling irritated and trying, on all levels of consciousness, to think of a way out of this situation. The customs area was crowded and small, and she was feeling claustrophobic. Her soldier's instincts were screaming at her to find a high ground with a good view.

Before she could make a move, however, two very large, very well-armed security guards approached, having been signaled by the customs officer. Jenny acted fast, without thinking, hurling all her considerable strength into a debilitating kick to the stomach of the larger man, then a quick turn literally on her heel to thrust her elbow into the other man's jaw, causing him to stagger. And then she was off, racing as fast as she could in the opposite direction, running back to her ship.

She heard shouts behind her, and an alarm sounded, and despite the little prickle of worry, she laughed aloud. Her lungs were strong and her feet were nimble, and there was no one- no one humanish, anyway- who would ever be able to catch her if she didn't want them to.

Suddenly, the world skewed. Everything had so many more _colors_ and she could see things... differently. Jenny didn't have words to describe it. She could just _tell_ what was coming, she could see how things were and how they had been and how they would be and everything in between. It was like double vision, almost, but not quite, and very, very... But it was wrong. Something was wrong, because the confusion triplicate she was seeing the world in felt bizarrely natural, but what she was seeing with it _was not right._

Without conscious thought, her footsteps slowed as she tried to quell the nausea that had suddenly awakened in her stomach. But the world was spinning around her and the color of the light felt strange, and she suddenly couldn't keep her balance...

She slowed to a halt, swaying. Dimly, from the recesses of her mind to which her consciousness was feeling, she felt a bolt of electricity- taser, probably- strike her body. She dropped to her knees, still wobbling as the world twisted and skewed in impossible, sickening, _wrong_ ways. And then the universe appeared to give a heaving wrench, and Jenny's assaulted mind fled in panic.

Everything went black.


	3. 2: Mission

**A/N-** When you finish this chapter, fans exclusively of New Who will be scratching their heads and saying "huhwhat?" Fans who are also familiar with Classic Who will either be hugging me for synthesizing New Who with the best, IMHO, of Four's era, or hurling rotten vegetables at me for the same. To the latter... please desist. I solemnly promise that, though I'm borrowing some concepts, I'm not just retreading old ground! For the exclusive New Who fans... advice: go to crossingthewhoniverse(DOT)com, look up the Tom Baker era, and watch Season 16. Once you know that, you will understand this fic.

Thank you for your patience. Let the story commence!

* * *

2. Mission

_"I was moving through the silence without motion,_  
_Waiting for you._  
_In a room with a window in the corner,_  
_I found truth."_  
_-Joy Division_

* * *

Jenny came slinking back to consciousness already very, very aware of how much her head hurt. Her eyes- but not _really_ her eyes, sort of something else behind (or beyond?) sight- burned, and her skull felt like a struck gong. She was, therefore, surprised when she opened her eyes and was able to tolerate the harsh lighting under which she found herself.

(She was also surprised to be seeing things in just three dimensions again, and perhaps just a bit relieved.)

She blinked a few times to clear her eyesight and reacquaint herself with consciousness again. Then she sat up. She was sitting on a cot in what appeared to be a holding cell; the walls were a greyish kind of off-white, with light let in through one end which was comprised of the outer dome's wall.

Jenny scooted down to the end of the cot so that she could see the suns; they were lowering, ever so slowly (in fact, totally imperceptibly to someone without her heightened senses), toward the horizon. She must have been unconscious for several hours if it was so late in the day. That surprised her. Usually when she was knocked out, whether by gas or a blow to the head or what have you, she woke within a few minutes.

Hell of a birthday this had turned out to be. She had really hoped that, just this once, she might avoid spending her birthday in a jail cell...

She gazed out at the diamond-studded sky, eyes continually drawn back to the suns, which she found to be comforting. Gradually, the whirl in her head faded to a tight little pinch behind her eyes as the tension drained out of her. Almost unconsciously, she slipped into the early steps of Ra'shir, a meditation technique she had learned back on Shan Shen. It was the best way she knew to balance out the warrior's instincts The Machine had imbued her with.

Gradually, her mind settled and she could hear the soft singing sound the wind made as it ran through the leaves of the dirgum trees on Phorax. To her, it was the most beautiful sound in the universe, and the rhythm of her heartbeats synchronized with the noise in her imagination.

_"Nameless..."_

Her body, which had relaxed as her mind calmed, snapped taught, and her eyes opened sharply.

_"Nameless..."_

A door opened in the outer dome wall of her cell; the door's edges were comprised of a steely glow that sent shivers down her spine.

"Who's there?" she asked, surprised by the nervous crack in her own voice. "What's happening?"

_"Please step through the doorway,"_ the telepathic voice commanded.

"Who are you?" Jenny insisted.

A sense of amusement touched her mind from somewhere beyond the doorway. _"So like your father, always asking questions,"_ the Voice said.

Jenny hesitated. Her hearts-double thumped in her chest at the word "father," but her instincts said to stay away. The landscape she could see beyond the doorway was blurry, but appeared benign. Nevertheless, she had a hard time denying the voice in the back of her head that warned that of _course_ someone trying to lure her to her death would tempt her with news of her father.

Impatience prickled at her senses from the other side. _"You will not be harmed, Nameless,"_ she was told in an imperial tone.

Another second's hesitation, and then Jenny's curiosity got the better of her. She stepped through the door. As she stood between the frame, the world warped for a second and her blood ran hot-then-cold.

She was left standing on the surface of Arius-5, with the galaxies spangling the heavens above her. She didn't bother to question how she was breathing. What she did wonder was where the city had gone. When she glanced over her shoulder, she could see the cell she had just left through the doorway, but where a twenty-mile chain of interconnected crystal domes should have glittered in the starlight, there was... nothing. Jenny was alone on the airless surface of a silent world.

"What is this?" she shouted. "Where am I?"

The woman did not appear suddenly, and neither did she fade into being slowly. It was more like she had been there from he beginning, and Jenny had only just noticed her. She was dressed in a snow white pantsuit, and her wavy red hair glowed like fire in the sunlight.

"You are outside of Time," she said, this time out loud.

Jenny smiled widely, mostly from relief. "Donna!" she exclaimed, relieved to see a familiar face.

But 'Donna' shook her head. "No, Nameless. I am not the woman called Donna Noble. I bear this form in her honor, to remember her to the universe which owes her its life."

"Then who are you?" Jenny asked.

"I am the White Guardian," the being with Donna's face said. "I am the keeper of Time and Order in this and other realities."

Jenny nodded slowly, not really catching on but synthesizing information nonetheless. "Okay," she said. "Why am I here? What do you want with me?"

The Guardian sat down. Jenny hadn't noticed the chair. "Something is wrong with Time," the Guardian explained. "I suppose you will have noticed it. The... fluctuations. You're nearing the age now at which your time sense would begin to manifest itself." She shook her head, scarlet locks rippling. "You see, a foolish human child has been smashing through realities. In a bygone era, your people, my champions, would have held Time and Space in balance, and the flight of the Bad Wolf would not have caused much harm. But the Time Lords are all but gone, as you know quite well, and the universe feels the loss keenly now more than ever."

Head spinning, Jenny tried to keep up. "Bad Wolf? Time sense? What?" she sputtered.

The Guardian sighed, a sad smile on her face. "A child of Gallifrey, and yet so very much in the dark... In the days when the Time Lords walked tall, you would have been the shining jewel of the Academy. A direct descendent of the Other... yes, he was one of my favorites, I must say. But that is all lost, I suppose. And you will still be great, Nameless One. I have appointed you my champion."

Jenny held up her hands, even her quick mind failing to keep up with the Guardian's (apparently) nonsensical ramblings. "Okay, slow down one second. First of all, I am _not_ nameless. I have a name: it's Jenny, and it was given to me by the woman whose body you're wearing! Secondly, your "champion?" What the hell does that even mean?"

The Guardian let out a soft chuckle. "You know as well as I that the name Jenny is merely temporary. It is fine for the infant you have been. But for the Time Lady you must become, if the universe is to survive the damage done in ignorance..." She shrugged. "It was a tradition, on Gallifrey, to reserve the giving of a _true_ name to the children destined to become Time Lords until after their initiation rites. You are nearing that age, Nameless, and as things stand, there is no safe, simple initiation- well, relatively speaking- by means of the Untempered Schism. You will stand trial by fire as my champion, and on the other side you will find in your heart the name you were destined to wear."

She didn't understand most of what the Guardian was saying, but Jenny nodded anyway. "So... what exactly does this entail?" she asked. She had a weird feeling as though she were signing her life away without reading the fine print.

"As I have said, a human child walked the realities, and though her intentions were noble, her actions have grave consequences. The fabric of Space and Time is tearing apart. In fact, it is tearing apart _here_, on this world you mortals call Arius-5. When it tears fully apart, the rift will only spread, devouring whole galaxies and drawing them into the Void."

Jenny nodded, pieces starting to come together. "And that would be... bad..." she hazarded.

The Guardian made an expression that might have been a smirk. "I suppose it would, yes. Most certainly it would be pleasing to the Black Guardian, the bringer of chaos."

"So, what do you want me to do about it?" Jenny asked.

"You must find the Key to Time," the Guardian informed her.

"And what's the Key to Time?"

"It is a great Key, forged in the fires of creation, which can control Time itself. This is a dangerous power for any individual to possess, and so the Key was divided into six parts and scattered across creation, each piece taking a different form to disguise its true nature. Before you ask, no, I do not know where the pieces are. However, I have this." She pulled from the air- except maybe it had been floating there before and Jenny just hadn't seen?- a slim silvery-white rod which emitted little flashes of light at seemingly random intervals. "This is the Key's core, and it will guide you to the six parts of the Key. You must find and unite the segments, and return here, to Arius-5, to close the gap."

_Well._

Jenny had done some pretty fantastic things before, if she did say so herself, but this was the first time since Messaline she'd been given a mission. She couldn't decide whether to rejoice in being given orders or to feel uncomfortable in her own skin because of them. She settled for asking more questions.

"Why can't you just find this Key thing?" she asked. "You're an all-powerful keeper of balance or whatever."

The Guardian shook her head. "The Key can only be used by a citizen of the universe. I am not of this universe- I stand apart, as does my dark counterpart. I have chosen my champion. Be assured that he will have chosen his."

"Great," Jenny muttered.

"I have chosen an assistant to aid you in your quest," the Guardian continued. "Perhaps you, as your father once said to me, prefer to work alone. However, there will come a time when you will be in great need of a companion to assist you, and when that day comes, you shall have one by your side."

Jenny shrugged. She had occasionally picked up a traveling acquaintance as a matter of convenience over the past seven years; traveling with an entourage wasn't a new experience. An annoying one, usually, but nothing she couldn't handle. "Alright," she said. "Who is this assistant?"

The Guardian smirked. "I think you'll recognize him when you see him," she said. Then she waved a dismissive hand, and Jenny took that as her cue to go. However, at the last moment, something seemed to occur to the Guardian and she called after the retreating Gallifreyan.

"Oh, Nameless?"

The blonde turned back to face the ivory enigma. "What?"

"Your time ship is woefully inadequate to the task. I have arranged alternative transport for you. Do you think your ship can reach forty-second century Espero?"

Jenny pursed her lips at the implied insult to her engineering skills, but let it pass. The Guardian might be a peaceful being, but Jenny didn't want to test that theory by pushing her luck too far. "My ship will do just fine for that kind of trip," she said shortly.

"Very good," the Guardian said. "Then all is well."

Jenny stepped back through the doorway into her cell. The Guardian vanished. The cell door opened.

* * *

**A/N- **Ooh, who's Jenny's new companion? Got any theories? Got any ideas about what kind of "alternative transportation" is available on Espero? Hint: it's provided by someone from Doctor Who canon... but not somebody from the show. Companion- kind of- of the Eighth Doctor... Ringing any bells? No? Well, I suppose you'll just have to find out... Leave me a lovely little review and tell me what you think!


	4. Apology AN

**Okay, yeah, I know, you're probably hating me for this even before I start.**

**Just blame the fact that I'm at university, okay? I have to pare down the fics I'm working on or my GPA will suffer, and that's unacceptable. Someone with my IQ  
cannot flunk out of college (or, y'know, get anything less than a 3.9 on a 4-point scale, because all things considered, it's the same thing in my eyes).**

**Long story short, I just don't have the dedication to write an entire Key To Time quest.**

**I might return to this over the summer, when I have lots of free time to write. In the meantime, however, I'll continue to work on my JE + Romana and Runaway Bride + Romana fics, as well as my other ongoing Jenny story (and yes, I know that I promised the update on that months ago, and the next chapter is almost done, but there's just something bothering me that I can't quite put my finger on, so until I know exactly what needs to be fixed, I'm holding off. Perfectionist? Me? Naaah...)**

**Long story short, I'm really sorry, but this story is on indefinite hiatus.**

**And to those of you who guessed that Laura "Compassion" Tobin, the living TARDIS, was going to be Jenny's new form of transportation... well, you were right. And maybe we'll still get to see that yet, but it all depends on if I have the time at some point in the future.**


End file.
